The nicest door handle I ever knew was that of the Mk2 Jaguar I owned, restored and drove for 12 years. It has been bettered before (by Bentley) and since (by Alfa Romeo), yet the pleasure I got from opening the door of my Jag remained undiminished.

The pleasure was twofold: opening the driver's door from the outside, and from the inside. The exterior handle was a delightful piece of sculpted chrome, with a button you had to press to open the door. The interior handle was a curved chromed lever at the front of the door that fell to hand naturally, unlike most cars I've driven since.

It protruded from the pale blue Connolly leather door lining just enough to reach one's finger around. (I had replaced the original imitation-leather plastic panels.) The doors opened with the precision of a rifle-bolt and closed with a satisfying 'clump'. The handles of the rear doors were slightly different to match the assured flow of this mechanical cat's curvaceous body. So, the

re you are - the simple (sad to some of you) pleasure that a small yet beautifully produced piece of design and engineering can give. I suppose the door handles on cars like my Jag were much the same as cuff links in the days when most pukka chaps wouldn't be seen dead with buttons on their shirt cuffs.

In much the same way that shirt manufacturers went in for buttoned cuffs in the Sixties, so car manufacturers, in the following decade, abandoned the sculptural door handle for those nasty recessed tabs that still deface the sides of most cars made today. If I have one niggling criticism of my current Jaguar - a 12-year-old V12 Sovereign - it is the nasty recessed tabs passing for door handles that deface its otherwise svelte bodywork. They work, but so do Coke dispensers and 'cattle' gates in Underground stations.

If you think the design of a door handle on a Jaguar really doesn't matter, then I am afraid there is no hope for you. Settle for a Lada Niva, sofas from discount warehouses, wallpaper from DIY stores and genetically modified food from superstores. 'God is in the details,' said Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a man of few words and one of this century's greatest architects and furniture designers. Great architects worry about the design of door handles for much the same reason as the best car designers do - because the door handle is the first part of a building you come into contact with. If you have ever visited a building by Mies or Gaudi, by Frank Lloyd Wright or Alvar Aalto, you will understand.

If I had the time and didn't believe that it is best to keep a machine much in the same condition as when it first comes into your care, I would replace the late-Seventies door handles on my Jag with those from a Series I XJ6 or V12 from the late Sixties and early Seventies. They marr the experience of this essentially louche saloon as much as a plastic stem would do a shapely wine glass. They flip and they flap, but they never clunk and click as all good door handles should.

These schlock Seventies door handles are found on new cars worldwide. The one variant has tended to be the brutish, contemporary equivalent of the trad door handle. This is a thick and doltish bar that spans the indentation in the door where the hand is meant to cup around the handle naturally. These can be found on many makes of uninteresting executive car. They are horrid things to touc, and are evidently shaped by those who hold atheist views about design: there is no God in their details.

Thankfully, the heyday of the door handle as automobile art is on its way back, thanks to an increasing number of manufacturers, such as Alfa Romeo, trying to bring some glamour back into a realm of design that has been dominated by what I heard someone call 'the sucked lozenge school'. You get the idea: about 90 per cent of new cars look as if their design has been inspired by a well-sucked pear drop.

The graceful door handles that insinuate their ways from the bodywork of the latest generation of Alfas prove that the sculpted handle can co-exist happily with the latest stringent safety legislation. Other manufacturers are following suit. It is sad to see Jaguar failing to return to real door handles on its new S-Type, a car that looks altogether too American.

There is, though, a case for no visible handles at all; the rear doors of the new Alfas have secret ones. The idea was to make the car appear super sporty: it looks as if it has only two doors, and two doors signifies 'Varrrooommm' in car-speak. No handles at all is the province of the 'supercar'. Was the Lamborghini Countach the first road car with no visible door handles? I'm sure there must have been others, but what an exciting car that was before it put on too much weight and spoilers that did just that.

A lack of visible door handles had two effects, one psychological and one physical. The first has to do with the fact that it made a very exclusive car seem even more special. The second was that the Countach was designed to go faster than a Ferrari, and handles that protruded even slightly would have had the effect of reducing its top speed by a significant degree.

There's little doubt that the 'retro' school of car design is in the ascendant. Everywhere you look, in showrooms and car parks, the front of famous buildings you can't photograph the way you want to because cars - handles or no handles - are always in the way, you will find cars sporting details from period models. The return of the sculpted door handle is a part of this school, and one of the best things going for it.

Of course, you might feel that a handle is an unworthy subject for discussion in a column that should be devoted to nought-to-sixty stuff, but many salesmen would agree that a car can be sold in that ineffable moment when a potential buyer opens the door for the first time. If it feels good, as it does with a Bentley, Alfa Romeo or classic Jag, then the cat may well be in the bag. But why the cat should be in the bag is a mystery as great as that of why the sculpted door handle disappeared in the first place.